The Reading Away Day Awards 2024

Recap the highs and lows of the Royals’ games on the road in the last 12 months.

2024 is drawing to a close, and it’s been some year for Reading Football Club. The end of significant periods always call for some sort of awards to recap and remember the time just passed. Instead of “Best Player”, “Top Goalscorer” and whatever other categories there usually are, because they’re just a bit boring, predictable, and no one wants to hear my opinion on them, I’ve looked at it more from a fan’s perspective.

Although I’m far from the absolutely most qualified person to talk about this, as someone who goes to a decent number of Reading away games, I feel fairly confident about my assessments of the destinations we’ve had the pleasure of visiting in 2024.

The gimmicky categories made up by me are below, and I’ve talked about the best and the worst, as well as a few honourable mentions in there. I’ve tried not to let the result of the match cloud any judgement and have also not picked Reading for anything for fairness, although maybe a slight bit of unconscious bias could well have slipped in there.

The grounds

Best: Birmingham City takes the crown for this one. Some League One stadiums are small and old, some are big and soulless, but I think St Andrews is the best of both worlds.

Built in 1906, it keeps the slightly muddled-up feel between the four sides. The historic main stand next to the two-tiered away end and the other two stands are more modern but retain a lot of character. They manage to fill the 30,000-capacity ground well too, to their credit.

Worst: The Pirelli Stadium of Burton Albion takes worst for me. From the outside it looks like a three-storey office block you’d see by the side of a semi-urban motorway and it’s surrounded by suburbia and warehouses.

None of the stands are connected, giving it a slight vibe of a stadium you’d build on Dream League Soccer, and the away end is very odd. I usually like a terrace, but this one felt extremely overcrowded, the concourse was weird, and the view was not great. Built in 2005, it has no charm or history to it either.

Honourable mention: Fleetwood Town. It’s fair to expect Fleetwood to have a stadium below par for the level given their meteoric rise up to League One, but I didn’t quite expect a disused stand hidden behind another on one side of the pitch, while further down that side a clubhouse that rather resembled someone’s front room.

It certainly had some character to it, but can’t be best purely on the ground’s size.

View

Best: If you’re booking any summer holidays at the moment for next year and fancy an alpine destination with some steep hills to climb, then save your money and instead head to Rotherham United.

The away end was in a stand so steep that it almost felt unsafe; I suggest airbags covering the front few rows to cushion the falls of away fans’ “limbs”. However, it does mean that even if you had Peter Crouch on a ladder stood directly in front of you, you’ve still got a great view of all the action because of the rapid ascent, so swings and roundabouts, I guess.

Worst: Wrexham. Watching a game at the Racecourse Ground from the away end felt like trying to watch my local Sunday League team, but if I were sat inside a post box across the other side of the park peeping through the letterbox, and getting hit by oncoming parcels at regular intervals.

In great contrast to Rotherham’s, there was hardly much of a step up between rows, so as a marginally vertically challenged man in the upper part of the stand that day, coupled with the annoyingly placed pillars for the roof, the view wasn’t great at Wrexham. Maybe the lower part of the stand was better, who knows?

Place

Best: I’m going with Colchester for this one. I’m not very well travelled in that part of the country, so it was nice to visit there firstly, and the town itself is a great place.

Colchester Castle was lovely, as were the gardens and parks around it, and there were plenty of other old Roman-type things if you like that sort of thing. Not too much of a big, busy place, but more than enough to entertain oneself with on a matchday. I can’t believe how flat it is around there - Icould see for miles around.

Worst: I feel a bit mean with this one as, compared to the destinations in the Championship, League One is far better in terms of places. We’ve swapped Sunderland, Middlesbrough, and Stoke for Exeter, Shrewsbury and Peterborough, for which I’m very thankful.

One team that’s followed us down is Rotherham United though, and they take the title for this award. It’s not too bad, but still gives the impression of a slightly barren and sombre industrial town.

Honourable mention: I’m choosing Barnsley for this, on a basis of defying expectation.

I can’t speak for the whole of the town, but the area around the train station is really nice, including the areas for shopping, eating out, the small Christmas market, and particularly Barnsley markets, a proper throwback to the indoor markets I used to go to every weekend as a kid. It’s not the best for sure, but much better than my preconceptions of the place.

Home support

Best: Stockport County. They had singing sections in two areas: next to our away fans block and at their end of the ground. There were a couple of drums in use, which I know some people aren’t a fan of, but I don’t mind personally.

The Cheadle End, the massive 5,000-capacity stand at the end, is to die for in terms of creating atmosphere. It’s properly close to the pitch and County fans use it well. The 4-1 result in their favour no doubt helped, but I was very impressed with the atmosphere created by the home fans.

Worst: I’m sorry Wigan Athletic, I know yours is predominantly a rugby town, but it’s hard to look past the Latics fans for the worst home support I’ve seen this year.

The ground doesn’t help them at all: it’s too big and soulless. Their average of 8,500 fans doesn’t do much to fill the 25,000-capacity DW stadium, and despite a win for Wigan for our visit in January, there was very little noise from them too.

Travel

Best: There are many places so much closer for Reading fans coming from Berkshire, but in terms of stadium placement and accessibility, there’s no better than Bolton Wanderers.

Although it’s a fair way out of town, a train from Manchester Piccadilly can take you through the many metropolitan places in northwest Manchester to Horwich Parkway, which is right on the doorstep of the ground. It also means you don’t ever have to step foot in Bolton to reach the ground. Result!

Worst: Colchester by a country mile. The ground is next to the motorway, two miles walk from the train station, and even further to the town centre. You’d think they’d have some sort of matchday buses, or even regular normal buses to get spectators to and from the games, but no.

Thankfully, that was alright for me, as we stayed in Colchester and drove to the stadium. But actually no, it wasn’t, as someone from the council had cleverly locked the car park during the game, leaving hundreds of fans from both sides stranded there for hours, and we were only freed when some random fella broke the gate open with a crowbar. Not ideal at all.

Honourable mention: Another honourable mention goes to Fleetwood, this time for their transport. They have literally zero train stations in their town and are only reachable by tram or bus. They are quite literally the definition of a bus stop in Blackpool.

Stewards

Best: Carlisle United take this. The best kinds of stewards are the ones who let you do what you like and go where you want, within reason of course.

Any Royals fans like me who went to Carlisle who had a flag with them were allowed to put them up in the adjacent stand next to the away end, and for that we got taken practically onto the pitch pre-game, mere yards away from the Reading goalkeepers warming up in a practice net, and the same after the match to collect it too. The stewards were great in accommodating this, and were friendly and helpful the rest of the time too.

Worst: It’s hard to say worst, because as a steward there’s not really too much you can do wrong. I’ll go with Derby County, just for the sheer number of stewards they had around the Reading away end that night.

It wasn’t a massive turnout on the road from us either, so we practically had one per supporter. That must make one wonder about the capabilities of each steward given they felt they needed so many.

Honourable mention: Lincoln City. The stewards at Lincoln a few weeks back asked me and my mates for IDs for our under-18 tickets, which we could not produce, and on that basis wouldn’t be let in, so I unfortunately had to go to vast expense to purchase everyone adult tickets given we couldn’t prove our age.

The stewards were actually very nice about it to be fair, and were only doing their jobs, but that’s my own little personal gripe with them.